Intelligent Highway Infrastructure for Planned Evacuations

Abstract

Disasters, natural and man-made alike, pose a serious threat to the nation by taking a heavy toll in human lives, destroying the public infrastructure and production capacity, interrupting supply lines, and stalling economic activity. One of the time-honored strategies for dealing with predictable natural disasters is a planned evacuation of the population from the afflicted area. Thus, evacuation strategies and supporting infrastructure are of the highest importance for mitigating the effects of such events. The main contribution of this work is to propose an intelligent highway infrastructure in support of planned evacuations. Specifically, we show that the recently-proposed architecture for the notification of traffic incidents and congestion (NOTICE) can be enhanced to support the needs of large-scale evacuations.